The Southern Poverty Law Center has finally overstepped its bounds and mislabeled the wrong organization as a “hate group,” and in doing so has completely destroyed whatever credibility it had left.

“After years of smearing good people with false charges of bigotry, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has finally been held to account,” Marc Thiessen wrote in his latest Washington Postcolumn.

The column is in response to the SPLC’s $3.375 million settlement and public mea culpa to Maajid Nawaz, a former radical Islamist who has become a Muslim reformer whom the organization included in its “Field Guide to Anti-Muslim Extremists.”

The columnist went onto claim that the “once-storied organization that did important work filing civil rights lawsuits against the Ku Klux Klan in the 1970s” has lapsed into a cartoonish hate factory by “labeling virtually anyone who does not fall in line with its left-wing ideology an ‘extremist’ or ‘hate group.’”

After he left radical Islam behind, Nawaz has served as an advisor to three British prime ministers, Thiessen noted further. In addition, he created an organization – the Quilliam Foundation – whose goal is specifically to fight against Islamic radicalization and extremism. He’s not an “anti-Muslim,” as the SPLC intimated. Rather, he’s a legitimate reformer who has often argued that “Islam is a religion of peace.”

And yet, as Breitbart Newsnotes, he and his organization found their way onto the SPLC’s “hate” list, a “pseudo-guide” the group claims is full of anti-Muslim bigots and racists. How?

Theissen writes that Nawaz’s “crime” was elevating himself and his cause to become a leading voice opposing Muslim radicalization – the same ideology he once believed in.

In its apology, the SPLC noted that Nawaz has “made valuable and important contributions to public discourse,” which includes the promotion of pluralism along with condemnations of both anti-Muslim bigotry and Islamic radicalization.

This is the new way of the Left

“Let’s hope this settlement is the first of many,” Theissen writes, noting that the incorrect labeling of Quilliam and Nawaz is not the first time the SPLC has done so. In 2010 the organization put the Family Research Council, a Christian family values organization, on its “hate map.” The listing so angered a Leftist he went to the FRC’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., two years later and shot up the place, intending to “kill as many as possible and smear the Chick-fil-A sandwiches in victims’ faces.” The gunman told FBI agents he used the SPLC “hate map” to select his target.

“The only way to stop the SPLC is if people stop giving it money and the media stop quoting it or taking it seriously,” Theissen writes. “The SPLC once did important work fighting the Ku Klux Klan. But when it declares Maajid Nawaz, the Family Research Council, Ben Carson and Charles Murray as moral equivalents of the Klan, it loses all integrity and credibility.”

In reality, the SPLC itself is a hate group. Like all deranged Leftists, the organization hates conservatives, Republicans and Trump supporters because they disagree politically and ideologically.

While that used to be looked upon as simply foolish, it’s not possible to dismiss such inaccurate characterizations today. Unhinged Leftists are making all kinds of threats against Trump supporters and even members of his government. They are threatening ICE agents. They are calling for more “confrontations” and violence.

They are, in effect, recreating the conditions for a second civil war in America, and what’s more, they don’t care one whit about the violence they are inciting.

Groups like the SPLC have been a part of that incitement to violence. Read LIES.news for more coverage of the insidious lies of Left-wing groups.